I don’t reach for a glass of wine after the child’s in bed and dinner’s over. I reach for a bar of chocolate and push it into my mouth like a log into a sawmill. When my tongue is coated in the ambrosial mixture of sugar, milk powder and vegetable fat, when the glucose hits my bloodstream, when my stomach is filling with caramel, peanut pieces, shortbread wafer, or any of the multitudinous other vehicles the ceaseless ingenuity of man has created to deliver yet more deliciously the very emptiest of calories to my Stakhanovite digestive system, that’s when I relax.
lucy mangan